In many cases, a customer who has a general itinerary for travel will ask a travel agency to find the lowest-priced travel arrangements that conform to the itinerary.
Previously, the process of determining the lowest-priced travel arrangements could only be performed manually by a travel agent, and therefore was extremely time-consuming and inefficient. More specifically, a travel agent was required to access one or more computer reservation systems to obtain inventory information (e.g., availability and/or rates) about all travel arrangements that conformed to the itinerary. If the travel arrangements were work-related, the agent then had to account for any discounts available through the individual customer's employer. Although existing computer reservation systems maintained such employer discount information, the travel agent had to input specialized codes into a computer reservation system to retrieve the information so that the listed rate of the travel arrangements could be discounted accordingly. Afterwards, the travel agent was required to also consider any promotional discounts that were available to the travel agency, such as, for example, space-banked seats, which would also lower the price of a particular travel arrangement. When all applicable discounts had been applied to all available travel arrangements conforming to the itinerary, the travel agent was required to manually compare the discounted rates to identify the lowest-priced arrangements. Since the travel agent could not serve other customers during the above-mentioned steps, the agent's productivity decreased. To make matters worse, this prior process of determining lowest-priced travel arrangements was often repeated at the time of ticketing to ensure that the price originally quoted to the customer was correct.
Furthermore, even though a travel agent could become more efficient in the process with experience, it could not be guaranteed that the process would always produce the lowest-priced travel arrangement. In other words, because so much of the prior process required input and/or calculation by a travel agent, the accuracy of the process was extremely susceptible to human error.